Tolkien, in other words, wanted Middle-earth to be full of the supernatural, with trackless woods full of powerful beings, such as Elves. Or rather, denaturing those beings until they came to look like those photographs of fairy folk that so enraptured Conan Doyle.' He quotes Carter's explanation that 'Nineteenth-century nostalgia disinfected the wood, cleansing it of the grave, hideous and elemental beings with which the superstition of an earlier age had filled it. But to be lost in the forest is to be lost to this world, to be abandoned by the light, to lose yourself utterly, an existential catastrophe Ĭurry states that Middle-earth is exactly not like that 'English wood'. an English wood, however marvellous, however metamorphic, cannot, by definition, be trackless. nothing like the dark, necromantic forest in which the Northern European imagination begins and ends, where its dead and the witches live. Curry was alluding to Angela Carter's analysis of the wood in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The scholar of humanities Patrick Curry argues that what set Tolkien against Shakespeare was his ''denaturing' of Elves', his explaining away of their distinctive character. But the disastrous debasement of this word, in which Shakespeare played an unforgiveable part, has really overloaded it with regrettable tones, which are too much to overcome.'

In another letter, Tolkien wrote that 'I now deeply regret having used Elves, though this is a word in ancestry and original meaning suitable enough.

By the early 20th century, an artist like Arthur Rackham could depict Elves as miniature figures, as in this illustration 'To make my small elves coats' for A Midsummer Night's Dream. Tolkien regretted Shakespeare's 'disastrous debasement' of 'Elves'. Shakespeare as a source Tolkien's dislike of Shakespeare The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey suggests that Tolkien may even have felt a kind of fellow-feeling with Shakespeare, as both men were rooted in the county of Warwickshire. He arguably drew on several other plays, including The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, Part 1, and Love's Labour's Lost, as well as Shakespeare's poetry, for numerous effects in his Middle-earth writings. Tolkien was influenced especially by Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and he used King Lear for 'issues of kingship, madness, and succession'. Tolkien disapproved in particular of Shakespeare's devaluation of elves, and was deeply disappointed by Shakespeare's prosaic explanation of how Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane Hill in Macbeth. Shakespeare's influence on Tolkien was substantial, despite Tolkien's professed dislike of the playwright. Tolkien derived the characters, stories, places, and languages of Middle-earth from many sources.

Tolkien fellowship of the ring